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Description/Abstract

Breast cancer survival rates have risen dramatically over recent years with many women expectedto survive their diagnosis and live long and fruitful lives. As a result ‘cancer survivorship’ hasbecome of interest to health care providers who state that future services must be developed thatbetter meet the long term health needs and expectations of this group.

To this end, the role of health behaviour change in the secondary prevention of breast cancer is apopular area of research. To date, however, there are no published investigations into what thelikely uptake in health promotion activities would be; an important consideration when developinghealth services.

Over a period of six months between April 2007 and September 2007, all eligible newly diagnosedpostmenopausal women with breast cancer from the participating NHS trust were invited toparticipate in a clinical trial to assess uptake and response in a group healthy eating programme.

The primary outcome measures were to assess the proportion of women who enrolled on thehealthy eating programme and to identify health behaviours that predicted enrolment. Secondaryoutcome measures were to assess the change in diet quality; change in weight and to identifyhealth behaviours that predicted attendance at classes.

Twenty one percent (21%) of women invited agreed to attend the healthy eating programme andwere subsequently randomly assigned to either the healthy eating programme (n=5) or the usualcare group (n=6).

The results suggest that women newly diagnosed with breast cancer were not interested inattending healthy eating classes at the time of their diagnosis. However, screening rates fellsignificantly short of the target and therefore these results cannot be generalised to all newlydiagnosed postmenopausal women with breast cancer. Further, due to poor recruitment,secondary outcomes could not be assessed.

In summary, the study was unable to provide information regarding the likely interest andresponse to a group health eating programme for newly diagnosed postmenopausal women withbreast cancer. The reasons the study was unable to meet its aims was objectives were twofold;firstly the study failed to engage both NHS trusts for which approval was granted and secondly,screening procedures were not carried out as planned in the single remaining NHS trust.